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POLITICAL CATEGORIES

CATEGORIAL REDUCTION; OR, REDUCTIO AD CONCEPTUM

For much of its history, Western philosophy has been in the grip of the concept or the idea, the one all-powerful notion tasked with laying bare, dissecting, and explaining reality as a whole. Despite occasionally dividing against itself and generating inner frictions, the concept is sovereign (and absolutely so) before any attempt to work out the concept of sovereignty on our part. In modern politics, a version of this fixation on a single principle behind a plethora of beings and events is ideology, an extensive and largely unnoticeable dominant framework for thinking and perceiving, which precludes those interpretations that do not accord with its parameters. You can be sure that you are caught in the ideological web when, in the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, “everything is illuminated” and makes sense by inference from the same underlying cause: God or the nation, but also early childhood trauma, patriarchy, capital, technology, and, of late, the web itself—a social, ecological, communicational, political-economic, omnipresent network.

The concept and ideology simplify life and thought, spinning the fabric of existence without folds and saving us the energy (and the trouble) of thinking and acting in a nonautomatic, deliberate way. Political through and through, they paint the picture of a sterilized world without politics, the world of silent consensus and of no alternatives. We might say, en revanche, that metaphysics is an ideology of the idea or of the concept, oblivious to complex, plural, complicated, conflictual, and at times mutually contradictory explanations for what is the case. Metaphysics is simplicity itself raised to an ontological principle. Philosophers have rediscovered its essence relatively late and without realizing it in lex parsimoniae, also known as “Occam’s razor,” stipulating that the simplest explanation for the greatest number of phenomena is likely the true one.

While there is only one concept that agrees with the abstractly unified conceptual subject matter, the categories respect the multiplicity of the thing itself, in the thing itself, as they reflect its various dimensions. In contrast to the concept, no category alone can exhaust the sense of anything (of any thing), the machinations of metaphysics notwithstanding. The categories are folds, complications, pleats in being that crisscross the artificial subject-object chasm.

Limited in number, the categories are nevertheless a plurality. Aristotle singled out the basic ten, to which he then proceeded to add a few more; Kant came up with a table of twelve: four main groups with three variations each. In their manifoldness, they are better suited to politics, which even in totalitarian regimes is anything but an uninterrupted unity, and to cognitive activity, too. A protest against the power of the concept does not, after all, require the protestors to snub thinking. On the contrary, thinking and acting commence in opposing conceptuality. If parrying the metaphysical simplification of living-together is to be something other than empty words matching equally hollow gestures, then we would need to eschew the concept of the political and to elaborate the categories of politics.

Within the purview of metaphysics, the categories have been molded in the image of the concept. When philosophers advance their hyperbolic arguments that all is One (Plotinus), substance (Baruch Spinoza), relation (Alfred North Whitehead), and so on, what they really do is set up one category as predominant, to the exclusion of all others and to the delusional point of intellectual omnipotence. More than that, they keep mum about the categorial fabrication of the magic key to total comprehension. Kant’s transcendental conditions of possibility single out the category of modality, and Martin Heidegger’s being does so from a different angle, by stressing the centrality of existence replete with the infinite possibilities of finitude. (Kant, to be sure, reduces categories to concepts, defining the former as the “pure concepts of the understanding” [CPR A119],1 which is why, unlike Aristotle, he has to exclude the transcendental forms of intuition, time and space, from their midst.) Last but not least, in scientific rationality in denial as to its metaphysical origination, the category of quantity reigns supreme and numbers insinuate themselves into every area of life, including the political.

Proceeding phenomenologically, getting our bearings from the things themselves, we will be obliged to invert the relation between categories and concepts. Logical understanding models a predominant category on the unity of the concept. Phenomenological reason shows how the concept is born of a categorial reduction, that is, of selective blindness that lets the plurality of categories drop by the wayside. Left behind in the form of ineliminable residue is an inflated, overarching category unaware of its provenance. The thing that has first appeared as multidimensional needs to recede from theoretical view, its objective and subjective (understanding-related) syntheses obscured, in order for one of its categories to ascend to the throne of cognition in the mantle of a concept. Categorial reduction is at its most effective when things evaporate and beings dissolve into abstract being. Their disappearance gives rise to the concept—a single category imbued with meaning at the expense of everything else—in an interminable wake for the ontological richness of the world and the attendant epistemic wealth of categorial thought. At the same time, we would be foolhardy to assume that, to right such wrongs, it would be sufficient merely to transfer theoretical weight from unity to plurality in the Platonic “problem of the one and the many.”2 A cardinal solution, which the metaphysical worshipers of the one and the postmetaphysical devotees of the many discard from the get-go, is to lighten the burden of the problem and to relinquish the hopeful expectation that it will keep serving as our theoretical and practical cornerstone.

To stay with quantity: qualitative distinctions, modes of existence, and relations do not escape numeric translation once this category has become essential, notably as a vehicle for encoding information. The number dictates the senses of the economy with its quest for ever-growing profit margins; of culture through endless rankings of books, restaurants, theater productions, and the like; and of psychology by way of algorithmic ersatz thinking. Electoral politics tabulates the votes that resemble more and more the voters’ rankings of parties and candidates, with their choices analogous to pressing an online thumbs-up or like button. The consciousness of “glitches” in the system is also woefully quantified. What those concerned with democratic deficit lament is the electorate’s falling rate of participation and, therefore, the decreasing numbers of those willing to play by the rules of the rigged institutional game. Tongue in cheek, Cathy O’Neil cites the threat Big Data and algorithmic decisions pose to democracy as “weapons of math destruction.”3 But the core of our predicament, as I see it, is not quantification per se; it is the hyperinflation of one category at the expense of all the others. The current fetishism of numbers is an appreciable outcome of such hyperinflation, while the “seductions of quantification”4 are none other than the seductions of simplified, noncategorial ways of thinking.

There are, of course, precedents for numeric classifications in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, though the ancients would not have deigned to imagine a strictly quantitative appraisal of political life. Classical political thought posits a standard and a nefarious deviation from it: the rule of the majority in democracy or anarchy, of the select few who wield power in aristocracy or oligarchy, and of a single principle/prince of governance in monarchy or dictatorship. As a kind of life, however, political existence had to be oriented toward the unrivaled, common, universally shared good. More than the numbers of those in power, it was this qualitative stratum that cemented the project of coexistence, of living-together in the political abode, the community of the polis. Plato and Aristotle berated the rule of the many because, effortlessly swayed by skillful orators and demagogues, the many did not behold the good of all, not because they were many.

In point of fact, and more glaringly than in other kinds of human activity, numeric values by themselves do not communicate anything vital about politics. The rule of the many, the rule of the few, and the rule of the one lend themselves to a serious evaluation exclusively as regards their substance and outcomes. Which image of the polity do they project? Whose welfare do they promote? How close are they to the attainment of the universal good? How far from particular vested interests? At any rate, the difference between a regime and its perverse version is not numeric. Whether we agree with this standard or sneer at its “outdated” predilection for substantive over procedural considerations, it holds an important clue concerning the tyranny of the quantitative category distended beyond categorial confines.

The delusions of a postreductive concept aside, an isolated category is impotent to explain and to accomplish anything. In mathematics, rudimentary arithmetical operations with numbers entail comparisons of magnitudes, elements drawn from the category of relation. Strictly quantitative entities are static. If they are to become dynamic and—so unsettled—to make sense, numbers must be connected to one another by means other than numeric. The calculus of absolute and relative majorities in representative democracy is so much more than a series of arithmetical acts! It quantifies juxtapositions that, for their part, flesh out power relations between the officially recognized opposing factions, with differentials politicized or neutralized following the procedure in place: 50 percent plus 1, two-thirds majority, and so forth. Outside the desert plains of the concept, on the jagged and fertile terrain of categorial thinking, the essence of mathematics appears as not (just) quantitative but, at the very least, as the nexus of quantity and relation, subtended by the modality of necessity.

As long as we have understood political realities through the medium of a single category, we have indeed failed to understand them. Our failure is more momentous than a merely cognitive lacuna: it produces the riven political actuality of the twenty-first century. Already G. W. F. Hegel deemed the world of numbers to belong squarely to the “indifferent universal” (PhS §290).5 What happens when, violating categorial borders, numeric universality bears directly on quality, existence, actuality, and life melted down in the pot of Big Data? It is not hard to guess that an overreach of this sort is destined to spark intense opposition and revolt in that to which (or in those to whom) the universal gives the cold shoulder.

Quantitative universality and the backlash its indifference triggers structure global and local politics alike. Parliamentary or, in any case, representative democracy passes itself off for the sole legitimate regime and grounds its legitimacy in the calculation of majorities that, be they qualified or absolute, oftentimes encompass a minority of the population. Contingent on numbers and on relations among them, it is in sync with economicism, which modernity welcomes as the consummate form of rationality. The predominantly Western countries where this regime is the norm then flash it as the yardstick of sound governance for all times and places. Their message to the rest of the world is Obey not us but the sovereignty of numbers we stand for, a familiar formula where numbers replace, first, God and, second, Universal Reason.

Reactions to the democratic categorial reduction gush forth from the most diverse sources, ranging from religious fanaticism and the acts of terrorism it inspires to xenophobic nationalism and the myth of an originally untainted identity that has not fallen victim to numeric abstraction. Leftist antiglobalization and environmental movements also protest against the decimation of lives and of life by indifferent universality, a political position that gives the authorities an excuse to stick the label terrorist or ecoterrorist onto members of these alliances. But, worlds apart from the reactionaries, the movements in question are passionately committed to a universality without indifference, one that, like life itself, is singularized in each of its iterations and is pliable enough to change with actuality. Partisan though it may be, the fight for economic, social, and environmental justice transcends the dualism of the concrete and the abstract, the parochial and the uniformly global.

Concrete universals such as these stand little chance against political polarization that effaces all nuanced positions not in conformity with the dominant extremes. It is a widely accepted truism that the battle raging on political fields all over the world is a standoff between the forces of modernity and progress, on the one hand, and a reactionary antimodernism, on the other. A shift in the mindset the categories reward us with testifies to something else entirely: we now comprehend that we are ensnared in a competition between an abstract ideology of total quantification and its concrete negation, between the murderously indifferent translation of everything and everyone into measurable entities and a murderously differentiated untranslatability, ghettoizing human groupings behind walls and barriers, symbolic and material. We are tugging along in the comet tail of categorial reduction responsible for the bureaucraticization or informaticization of life and for the parochial revolts against these excesses of modernity.

A solution to the impasse is in broadening political categories beyond quantity, to which scientific rationality and the neoliberal world order have tapered them, and rescuing thought and action from conceptual strictures. This amplification would enlist the modal categories of existence, possibility, and necessity, political time and space, and the relations of community and dependence, to mention but a few salient examples. Were quantity put back on a par with quality and the other categories, our theoretical attention would no longer be riveted to concerns (important as they are) with who counts, how, and how much or little. Not only would the return of the categories induce a better, more thorough understanding of political entities and processes, but it would also reciprocally lead to a better politics, adequate to the multifaceted political thing itself. Upon the recovery of the categories, the hegemony of indifferent universality would come undone without the violence, entrenchment, and insularity marking the ultranationalist and religious reactions to its global ambit.

THE REAL PROBLEM OF REPUBLICANISM

Politics and its understanding, political ontology and political epistemology, meld together; nowhere is the word of Parmenides “the same thing is for being and for thinking”6 more hefty and valid than in politics. The cobelonging of the two orders inexorably affects the criteria for truth and falsity that mean something other than a statement’s adherence or nonadherence to “factual objectivity,” aka “fact-checking.” This is not an academic issue: whether successful or not, every political position engenders its truth as a function of the categories it admits and those it keeps out. In a brutal power grab, for which legitimizing narratives are always plentiful, power is the “thing” that is for thinking and for being. The thing’s ontological and epistemic banisters are the categories (in the case of power: the possibilities of wielding it, qualitative limitations over its use, the kind of substantive matters that are in its sphere of influence, the number of subjects who exercise control or owe their obedience …). Because at any given time there are several divergent reality-truth assemblages, skirmishes among them ensue. Every political struggle is, in the last instance, waged over the categories.

Take modality. What is the range of viable possibilities for governing a country and allocating its resources? What is so utterly necessary as to be inalienable? Do we have no choice but to implement austerity measures, as in Southern Europe? Is a society without poverty realistic, one where everyone would have a guaranteed basic income, as in an experiment now under way in Finland? In a pacifist mood, can we “imagine all the people …”? Musings such as these invite us to reassess the value of modal elements in politics. Beyond asking what is possible and what is not, we are interested in how and under what conditions the modal categories of possibility and necessity become politically possible and necessary. What justifies their discursive, ideational, and tactical deployment? Who taps into them and for what purpose?

In a macroscale division of political labor, “progressive” policies have tended to tie their fate to the apertures of possibility. Their conservative counterparts have put an accent on necessity, itself interchangeable with the impossibility for things to be otherwise than they already are. Both modal categories are the end results of convoluted and partly unconscious decisions on the limits of politics and existence. The importance of spatial orientations “right” and “left” pales by comparison with arguments from necessity and possibility. To gauge the prominence of modality, consider how the global neoliberal world order has donned the mask of inevitability. The extreme right is on the ascendance in Europe and the United States, because its leaders have managed to place their agendas at the vanguard of the possible, challenging neoliberal necessity in a way the left has been unable to do. The upending of the conservative-progressive continuum is a watershed event that comes on the heels of a victory in the battle over categories. What we are witnessing is a dramatic change of the subject who seizes the possible and mobilizes it or mobilizes the electorate with it.

A researcher, an activist, or an engaged citizen wanting to fathom the depths of a political situation will have to sift through the categories that are meaningful and those that aren’t within the frame of reference of that particular situation. Which ones stand out? And which are demoted to the undifferentiated and apparently neutral background of our concerns? Neutrality is the crowning achievement of what Carl Schmitt regards as neutralization, affecting not just the quantitative and relational friend-enemy intensities but also groups of categories relevant to the political thing itself. No category is safe from this double movement of foregrounding and backgrounding. Not even community, upon which the polity bestows form and which belongs to the category of relation. Suffice it to think here of Margaret Thatcher’s famous “There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families.” Does Thatcher not siphon meaning away from an allegedly irreducible political category? She is also correct in a sense: as things stand now, there is no society pursuing the public good; there are classes, the most powerful among these representing their particular interests as universal. The historical shape of political relationality today is noncommunal. Moreover, with a few exceptional flashes testifying to the contrary, politically organized relations have never been communal and might not be until communism is reimagined and put into practice.

This example of foregrounding and backgrounding a given category zeroes in on the perspectival angle of categorial thinking. Political aesthetics (Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière) sheds light on the conditions of visibility and invisibility as they affect political subjects. Political cognition hones in on what is politically thinkable or unthinkable in the presence or absence of certain categories. Thatcherism built upon the actual lacuna of community in politics and endeavored to make the common unthinkable by deleting the corresponding category from the cognitive field.

In view of the fact that in late modernity quantity eclipses everything, and the other categories, when they are not quantitatively revamped, fade into the cognitive background, the range of what is thinkable in politics and elsewhere has shrunk. In the best of scenarios, we are left with an enervated, abstractly indifferent (and nondifferentiated) concept of the political. In the worst, the concept, too, is dispensed with and nothing remains but political institutions requiring quantitative, statistical analyses.

Itself an upshot of a long genealogy of exclusions, categorial reduction can strike at any moment and from any direction. Prior to the modern onslaught of numbers, there was a period in the history of metaphysics when substance was paramount. All change appeared epiphenomenal then and politics (the abode of changing interests and alliances par excellence) was therefore negligible, out of touch with what was essential. But all roads lead to Rome, and, traveling the most diverse paths, we arrive at the same destination: a deficient understanding of politics and a lopsided political thing shorn of its categories. As a result, we do not know what sort of thing politics is, what systems we are actually living under, or what regimes we desire to bring forth.

Why, you might ask, name politics a thing? Res publica, translatable as “public affair,” gives us a pointer as to the thingly character of politics. In a sense, the qualifier publica is redundant. The thing is always public, in that it is inclined to phenomenality and presents itself to us, its surfaces at the disposal of our sight and taste, our perception and desire, our senses and thoughts. Ours, rather than mine, or, more precisely, mine insofar as ours. This book and the ideas it presents are only compelling to the extent that they are of consequence to us, to me and to you, its current and future readers. They are “mine” by virtue of “your” interest in them; hence, the use of the personal pronoun we throughout Political Categories. A thing held in secret or cordoned off from others as private property is an aberration within the general paradigm of thinghood and a contradiction in terms (I guard the secret and sequester the thing from the others because I know that it is not a priori accessible to me alone). Esoteric, occult writings and works of art are not unheard of in human history, but they also participate in the logic of thinghood: precisely due to the veil of secrecy that shrouds them, such writings and artworks stimulate an intense desire for revelation that would restitute to the thing its publicness.

A public thing is what gives itself to my perception or cognition and to the perception or cognition of anyone whatsoever, potentially making it a universally attractive matter. The thing that matters, die Sache, writes Hegel in The Phenomenology, is present before a consciousness that immediately learns that “others come hurrying over like flies to freshly poured milk, and they too want to busy themselves with it [und sich dabei geschäftig wissen wollen]” (PhS §417). Heidegger relies on the Germanic etymology of Ding, denoting a gathering or an assembly,7 to tease out the thing’s own sociality, its articulations resembling the logos of Heraclitus. The Roman res, whence stems realitas, does not swerve far afield from “articulation”: it causes human beings to gather around the thing as a matter of interest or concern.8 The political “Cause” is a shared Thing (cosa, coisa, la chose …) worth fighting and dying for.

All this is to say that res publica is a tautology and that we may safely drop the adjective without compromising the sense of the noun. Publica is actually a later addition to the strictly political use of the word. Cicero opens book 5 of De re publica with a quotation from the poet Enneus—“Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque [The Roman state stands upon its ancient manners and men]” (V.1)—that will resurface in St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei (II, xxi). The state, or “the commonwealth” as it is sometimes translated, is the Roman res, which stands firm (stat) on its old customs and its virile defenders. At the time of Enneus (second century BCE), it was in no need of the designation publica, which is affixed to it in the very title of Cicero’s work (between 54 and 51 BCE). What changed in the intervening period? We know that Cicero was deeply worried about private property rights and the dearth of their legitimation “by nature” (De officiis I.21). So, the addition publica to the original res was needed to distinguish it from privata in a second-order politicization of the thing we are still living through in the twenty-first century.

While politics is a special kind of thing, the thing itself is inherently political. This formulation forces us to rotate in a hermeneutic circle that has absorbed the difference between being and knowing, ontology and epistemology, philosophy and political philosophy. A theory of the categories is defective unless it attends to the flux and simultaneous reflux of thinking and thinging to and from the political frame.

Like republic, Realpolitik and pragmatism allude, each in its own ways and through distinct locutions, to the thingly character of politics. The first does so by invoking the Latin res, the etymological and ontological linchpin of the real, which is a subcategory of quality in Kant; the second, by resuscitating the Greek pragmata, the affairs that solicit our active engagement, or praxis. Unlike republic, Realpolitik and political pragmatism underscore one category—necessity, traditionally claimed as if by default by right-wing elements. With the constraints it imposes on the cognitive framing of what is, the somber necessity of “realism” is resolved to ostracize the very possibility of possibility, the notion that things, and, above all, the political thing, could be qualitatively (yet another category!) different. Giving themselves the excuse of a cautionary and reasonable action in the present, pragmatism and realism strive to conjure a discontinuous future away, to subdue time itself.

In tandem with the conceptual reduction of the categories, the self-congratulatory “rational” treatment of political affairs revels in a thing lacking in breadth as much as depth and castrated by its craving for omnipotence, that is, the power to hold possibility at bay. Res publica is different: it predates this brazen categorial reduction. Necessary and possible, singular and universal, substantivized in institutions and mobilized in the political subject, alternating between the states of passivity and activity, obedience and protest, being governed and governing, it defies the principle of noncontradiction. Fractured and internally conflictual, the political thing is all the more political, the more it feeds off paradoxes and contradictions. And it is all the more a thing, the more categories it interrelates, in that every thing is an inimitable gathering place, a crossroads for categorial configurations where the exact mixes of quality, necessity, action, place, possibility, quantity, time, and so on are never static in one and the same entity, let alone identical across different entities.

For Hegel, both the thing and the category are just that—intersections of subjective and objective being, of self-consciousness and actuality, each endowed with coherence across multiplicity. “What the thing is, is self-consciousness; it is thus the unity of the I and of being, the category [was Ding ist, ist das Selbstbewußtsein; es ist also die Einheit des Ich und des Seins, die Kategorie]” (PhS §344). The category and self-consciousness do not lay siege of things, walling them behind freestanding conceptual structures. From the outset, they take the side of things,9 sometimes with such fanaticism that they no longer recall who takes this side. The categories fall halfway between “pure” reason and “messy” reality (also, between Kant and Aristotle). To explore their political instantiations is not to promote political rationalism. Res publica, to paraphrase Hegel, is the unity of the we and of being in a testimony to how the world is given to us and how we are handed over to the world.

Lest the categorial elucidation of politics sound reifying, we ought to stipulate that the contours of the thing do not overlap with those of the object. Everywhere shadowing the subject, the object is that which is thrown against …, confronting us. The modern subject-object correlation is bereft of neutrality. It stages what plays itself out in our mental theater as a conflict between bitter enemies, the I and the other, who may be that most intimate of enemies I am to myself, as my “own” object. To this permanent warlike state of human consciousness reification is preferable on the condition that it silently exhorts us, as in phenomenological philosophy, to go back to the things themselves, to the political thing itself. Res publica is not an object set over and against human subjects, but the thing that, as Hegel helpfully points out, we ourselves are. It enfolds us, even and especially when politics assumes the shape of an intense and all-absorbing existential confrontation with an enemy. Dovetailing with the Aristotelian energeia, it is at once a resource and a nonresource, the actual and the potential, the means and the end of our pursuits.10 Res publica is a repository of the categories, unstable and self-contradictory; it is the category of categories, or, to use José Saramago’s felicitous phrase, the name of all the names.

No matter how receptive to internal contradictions, there can be no concept of res publica, because, qua concept, it would balloon beyond the limits of determinacy and lapse into absurdity. The categories of the political are not concepts but incepts (Heidegger’s Inbegriffe),11 the genesis of being and thinking eventuated in the thing that is and that is thought. Contemplating the time and space, necessity and possibility, activity and pathos, quantitative and qualitative facets of politics, we procure them from the political thing itself. We do not prowl for them in the ether of abstraction; they come to us from the temporally and spatially delimited modes of coexistence and strife, hemmed in to possibilities and necessities, practices and institutional arrangements, numeric restrictions on participation in decision-making and material borders of a polity. Conceptualization and that which survives the knife of categorial reduction will do no more than exaggerate one of these dimensions while obstructing the others and, consequently, squander the cognitive and ontological wealth of res publica.

To reiterate, resistance to the concept (is it perchance at the core of all resistances?) is emphatically not resistance to thinking. If anything, incepts and categories permit us to think better than concepts and ensure that we do not fall prey to endless particularization severed from the universal. The point is not to describe a political regime by detailing its historical, geographic, or economic contexts and embroidering its minutia on a prêt-à-porter spatiotemporal background. Assuming that we keep to the political thing itself, we will concentrate on the time and space res publica contains and indeed gives birth to.

The time of democracy, for instance, is historically sporadic, spanning as it does Greek Antiquity and revolutionary modernity, with long breaks, perforations, and punctuations in-between. The intermittencies of democracy and its excess over the period when it actually originated send us back to the time of this res publica itself, which has nothing to do with the calendar and which reemerges whenever the demand for equal rule among citizens is voiced. Similarly, the category of political spatiality is loosely connected to geographic and geometric spaces. Geopolitics is a perception of space within and outside national borders, the perception that, as Schmitt has noted, is rooted in the orientation of a political community toward the land it occupies or toward the sea and what lies beyond the familiar shores.12 The same physical territory of “the nation” will be viewed differently in the Portugal of the Age of the Discoveries and in Portugal as a member state of the European Union. In this disjunction resides the category of political spatiality.

CATEGORIES, NOT CLASSIFICATIONS

It has become plain in the course of the brief phenomenological experiment I have carried out on these pages that the categories are not classifications in disguise. At the risk of oversimplifying, I would encourage readers to picture classifications as empty conceptual boxes, vacuous forms indifferently filled with things that are shown to be appropriate to them a posteriori. So imagined, they are incongruous with the categories drawn from the things to which they a priori belong. (Kant will rebuff hypotheses entertaining the empirical origination of categories and defend their transcendental provenance. But when we account for political influences in their formation, the persuasiveness of his objections diminishes.) As the word intimates, classifications divide the world into classes and, therefore, into a hierarchical system with higher, intermediate, and lower tiers. They freeze and vindicate inequalities within and between heterogeneous groupings, whose members are stripped of the last vestiges of singularity and serve as mere representatives of cartoon-like types. The classes may be social, economic, and political or they may be scientific. If the latter, then classifications provide a facile solution to the problem of how to organize a “chaotic” assortment of entities (in a way that transposes actual power imbalances onto the structures of knowing). Null in themselves, the classified entities are assigned their respective values based on the place in the system their class allots to them. Their meaning resides not in them but in the empty containers they temporarily fill, wherein they are fungible with other specimens like them.

In the process of cutting off, circumscribing, and formalizing slices of the real, classifications politicize the world by foisting a hierarchical order upon it under the pretense of having sorted beings in a neutral, dispassionate, and scientific manner. That said, the choice before us is not, as is often believed, between a rigid hierarchy and total disarray. Of course, any order is the upshot of ordering and, as such, is political. It matters, however, whether the order is imposed onto that which is ordered from the outside or whether it develops in affinity with and from the interconnections among the “materials” it organizes. When speaking of kosmos, ancient Greeks saw no difference between the appearance of what is and the shining, beautiful order proper to what is. There, they detected a unity of form and matter, the hylomorphism that has been all but lost on the moderns.

Having cropped up in Aristotelian philosophy, hylomorphism was intellectually revived by Edmund Husserl and, through him, by the phenomenological movement. The primordial unity of matter and form is how expression works in phenomenology, in contrast to the operations of representation in classificatory systems of thought that forcibly disjoin hulē from morphē. Their coerced separation leads to an arbitrary exercise of force that institutes an order by way of imposing external constraints upon that which is ordered. Political authoritarianism thrives on the breakdown of hylomorphism. And, vice versa, where political matter and form still coemerge, autonomy, self-organization, and self-rule will flourish.

At odds with classification, the thinking of the categories does not go as far as to endorse the “cosmic” identity of being and ordering. Categorial thinking is merely a cognitive iteration of the nonhierarchical articulation that is the thing and logos. Rather than look up to the shining stars, it immerses itself in everyday life here-below and, like Socrates himself, goes to the marketplace. Kategoria, after all, includes the agora (“market” or “public assembly”) in its semantic pledge of allegiance to the thingly gathering. The word itself tells us that the acts of saying anything, of predicating and bringing to appearance, are political: public, contestable, available to scrutiny. Classification entombs things, sealing them in already prepared containers; categorization opens things to seeing-saying in common and stays faithful to their propensity for givenness. The so-called category mistakes are really classification errors.

As we survey the boundaries of kategoria, it bears mentioning that, in addition to its allusion to the agora, the word means accusation—something else Socrates was intimately familiar with. Kategoria publically points an accusative finger at the thing and, at a distance from that which is pointed out, identifies the thing as this one. Thisness, for Aristotle, is an important category, which has come down to us in English in the shape of “primary substance.” The thing identified as this can reveal the universality it harbors in its very singularity by means of an enhanced categorial analysis. The categories are the interpellations of things wrested from the undifferentiated background wherein they subsist. Calling things forth, the categories invite them to stand out as this and this and this … by means of being predicated or accused, chiseled out of their milieu, their edges sharpened, brought into relief.

There is undeniably a measure of violence in the juridical, political, and epistemic procedure of categorization, which singularizes through culpability and guilt assignment. Socrates had to be condemned to death because, accused for his actions in the agora, he eluded classification and categorization, its juridical overtones still resonating in modern philosophy by way of the Kantian tribunal of pure reason. As it weakens into assertions and avowedly neutral predications, the accusative impulse precipitates the philosophical categories. But, irrespective of the philosophers’ disapproval, the subterranean force of kategoria has not been depleted. Its political determinations and reverberations under discussion in this book are the indicators of a certain rawness, still unprocessed and perhaps unprocessable by intellectual machinery.

The accusative drive is a thorn in the side of ancient and modern systems alike, troubling the idyllic “cosmic” unity of being and ordering, as much as the diligently fabricated neutrality of symbolic statements. Thanks to this indomitable drive, as violent as it is revolutionizing, the thing-logos assembly thwarts the naturalization of being and knowing. If the categories also foil conventionalization, that is because they guard the “in-between,” not coinciding with the extremes. They are equidistant from the ahistoricity of objective facts and the subjective invention of norms.

Propitious to classifications, nominalism is the apex of a perfectly conventional order, which loses sight of res publica and material existence. Both nominalism and normativity go back to the same root cause: the hollowing out of the name and the semantic divestment of nomos no longer exhibiting the dynamic unity of order and orientation, with which Schmitt credited this ancient Greek word. The tired nature-culture debate boils down to a contest between the proponents of motionless categories and the partisans of empty classifications. But the main fault lines pass within mutilated categories, sundered between substance and subject, blind necessity and vacuous possibility, pathos and an active construction of a system. Classifications are categories depreciated in the second degree, their first-degree deterioration being the concept that at least preserves some inner relation to the conceptualized. As for the categories, they are conducive neither to an unbridled and random plurality of arbitrarily drawn distinctions nor to the dictatorship of the one, neither to nominalism nor to conceptualism with all their political implications.

Another key difference is the following. Classifications are analogous to the concept in that they are stabilized around the center, the average to which sundry classified things are brought, sacrificing variations among them. We might say that classifications are the hierarchies of the homogenized. The categories, conversely, are fringe terms maintaining the borders of that which they categorize. Working at the perimeter of the thing, they universally convey its singularity, without compelling us to average everything out or to espouse the “ideal case” (Weberian ideal types) abstracted from experience and prevalent in classifications. Categorial dynamism requires decentralization and meticulous border-work, not policing but caressing the edges of things in thought and letting them change at their own pace (the color of a chameleon switching from green to black, an absolute monarchy predicated on the will of one ruler mutating into a constitutional monarchy with varying numbers of actors authorized to make legitimate decisions), whereas the static nature of classifications rests upon their attachment to the center.

Is it not an oxymoron to appeal to “categorial dynamism” in contrast to static classifications? Aren’t the categories static by definition?

The categories usually correspond to assured ways of saying being (Aristotle) or to stable component parts in the apparatus of understanding (Kant). Wreaking havoc in the Aristotelian list and Kantian table of categories, Hegel sets them in motion when he shows how self-negated space reverts to time or how, after crossing a certain threshold, quantitative change builds up to a qualitative alteration. As we shall see, Schmitt repeats the Hegelian gesture with respect to politics: the moment the quantitative intensity of antagonism hits a critical point in any sphere activity, that sphere is politicized, qualitatively transfigured. The categories become mobile; set in motion, they upset—turn and overturn—the table, wherein they have been originally arranged. Their participation in this process (or in process dynamics as such) is not in and of itself a panacea against hierarchy, which creeps back in so long as only one of them functions as the mobilizing force. Politicization is the mobilization of the categories, the unsettling of their static order over and above the antagonism crystallized in friend-enemy distinctions. Hegel’s dialectics is innately political.

I would like to bring this section to a close with a word of caution. The political mobilization of the categories is not merely rhetorical. Their movements, slotted between the I/we and being, are in part those of the thing they illuminate, and, hence, of res publica. If politics is comprehended as contention, contestation, and antagonism, then something of these frictions not yet thematized as contradictions inheres in the political things themselves. If it is described as “the art of the possible,” then possibility resides in these very same things. The scholastic tinge of the argument extrapolating from knowing back to being, with Anselm’s ontological argument regarding the existence of God for a prototype, fades as soon as we realize that we are faced with categories, not classifications. Whereas classifications advance the agenda of the classifying agent or rationality, categories span in their intermediacy the speaking and that which is spoken about. Except that, considering that in politics ontology and epistemology are so tightly intertwined as to merge, the effects of classifications may be more political yet than those of categories.

INFRAPOLITICS AND INTRAPOLITICS

Politics, then, is a thing. And the inverse thesis holds as well: the thing and, by extension, every single category proper to it are political, ontologically im-proper, in excess of themselves. This means that a transfer and application of ideas from general philosophy to a study of political categories (or, in philosophical terms, from metaphysica generalis to metaphysica specialis) is a nonstarter. The coimplication of quodlibet ens, “whatever thing,” and the political thing suggests that any analysis of the categories must debunk the myth of their disinterested discovery and get to the bottom of their political manufacture.13

One consequence of the categorial feedback loop is that there is no political sphere per se and that, therefore, “everything is political.” To hold that everything is political is, nonetheless, to give up both on the concept and on the categories, seeing that this “everything” is as vague and void of content as “nothing.” Along with intellectual rigor, what vanishes from these slogans is the underlying shape of the res publica, to which the categories in effect pertain. When, as a result, political categories are fuzzy, the worst of demagogues usurp power. The propensity to “fudge” the outlines of politics has been ubiquitous in a great deal of modern political history. Its newfangled example is the one I have already cited—Trump’s election in the United States on a platform, developed over decades in neoliberal ideology, that systematically muddled up the differences between running a business and governing a state. The cure for categorial fuzziness is not in chasing after mathematical precision and bowing to the tyranny of quantity, however, but in availing ourselves in politics of the framework procured from the res publica, which, as we know, incorporates us into itself. Such a categorial framework is what I seek in the present study.

A discerning approach to the unchecked extension of the political glosses over “everything” as potentially political or, more succinctly, politicizable. That is the crux of Schmitt’s theory, where “from every ‘domain’ the point of the political is reached [von jedem ‘Sachgebiet’ aus der Punkt des Politischen … erreicht ist]” (CP 62),14 given the recoding of relations in that domain into a standoff of friends and enemies. It is possible that economic competition, as between the United States and the Soviet Union, or a clash of religious doctrines, as between Shia and Sunni Muslims in the Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy conflict, would prompt groups of competitors or doctrinaires to become (public) friends and enemies. Should this come to pass, the possibility of politicization would not be eroded the way potentiality gets enervated, worn out, and spent in its actualization but would only gain in strength: “The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility [die reale Möglichkeit] of physical killing” (CP 33).

Although the title of Schmitt’s book is The Concept of the Political (Der Begriff des Politischen), he defines his elusive theme through the category of modality. The porous, membrane-like borders separating the political from the nonpolitical overlap with the boundaries between existence and possibility—between what in the Kantian scheme are two modal subcategories. Fueled by the possibilities of friendship and enmity, intense conflict, and even physical killing, political existence is never actualized and retains its existential edge.15 In a fusion of all three subcategories of Kantian modality, existential ontology avows the necessity of possibility in and for existence. It is of this necessity that Schmitt takes hold for the sake of an existence that would be resolutely political.

On a sympathetic reading, the slogan “everything is political” signifies that, potentially political, “everything” is the infrastructure for the event of reaching “the point of the political.” The subject of the proposition is a scaffolding leading to the rooftop of existence where the possibilities of friendship, enmity, and combat predominate. More precisely, everything is infrapolitical, gifting politics with incredible pliability. The contents of infrapolitics are political and nonpolitical—economic, theological, cultural, and so on—in violation of the principle of noncontradiction characteristic of existential phenomena. What is sensu stricto intrapolitical, at least for Schmitt, is a singular relation (friend-enemy) and its quantitative dimension (the intensity of association and dissociation among its terms). The political, concomitantly, “does not designate its own substance but only the intensity of association or dissociation [Intensitätsgrad einer Assoziation oder Dissoziation] of human beings” (CP 38). Schmitt gathers the categories of relation and quantity under the aegis of modality (possibility), leaving quality, along with substance, out of the equation with the implicit excuse that these belong to the infrastructure of politics. In his ardent emphasis on desubstantivation, he does not veer off from the beaten track of the proceduralist and technicist (technocratic) parliamentary democracy he otherwise rails against. Desubstantivation may, thus, be the condition shared by modern hegemony and that which, or those whom, it represses: on the one hand, the legal master-subject raised to universality by virtue of neutrally applying general rules, and, on the other, the destitute slave-subject lowered to universality by virtue of having nothing to lose but its chains—this “nothing” referring to substantive being.

Politically regarded, substance is an accident; the place from which one arrives at the point of the political is aleatory. What else to expect of a theory where “the political” is a play among subjects devoid of substance? Those who subscribe to Schmitt’s method unburden themselves of preconceived ideas as to the subject’s whatness, the what of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and similar factors objectively identifying the who. Devoid of substance, the who is a singularity, bordering on that of the beloved, and a generality referring to just about anyone. The Aristotelian category of ousia (particularly, the second mode of beingness interpreting this as that) migrates to the margins of thinking and falls into disuse: from Kant’s subject to Heidegger’s Dasein and Schmitt’s “the political,” the protagonist is nonsubstantive, noncategorial existence, a this unspecifiable as that.16 Hannah Arendt’s and Schmitt’s own phenomenological grievance that the political subject has been forgotten under layers of substance signals their intransigence in the face of political categories.

The downside of the Schmittian solution to the “everything is political” quandary is that it condenses politics into a principle, albeit an existential one, and so tethers it to the logic of the concept. In this sense, The Concept of the Political is an accurate title for Schmitt’s enterprise, even if what sustains the transitions between infra- and intrapolitics in his theory is a mobilization of the categories akin to the Hegelian unsettling of the Kantian “table.” That Schmitt himself is au courant with the legacy of dialectics is evident in his admiration for “Hegel’s Hic Rhodus” and in the admission that “the often quoted sentence of quantity transforming into quality has a thoroughly political meaning [einen durchaus politischen Sinn]” (CP 62). The political meaning of quantity transforming into quality, or of the intensities of antagonism attaining a degree sufficient for the recrudescence of friend-enemy groupings, goes to the heart of the transition from infra- to intrapolitics. With perfect hermeneutic circularity, politicization ensues from the dialectical displacement of the categories and categorial movement is laid bare in its political character. The “genuineness” (Echtheit) of Hegel’s philosophy is, Schmitt contends, that it “does not permit the fabrication of intellectual traps under the pretext of ‘apolitical purity’ [‘unpolitischer Reinheit’] and pure nonpolitics [reiner Unpolitik]” (CP 62).

From our provisional definition of politicization as the mobilization of the categories we might surmise that its opposite—that is, depoliticization or neutralization—looms in the arrest of categorial movement and in the loss of porosity between the membranes of infra- and intrapolitics. Do political phenomena and existential experiences not stagnate in institutions, documents, and official posts that, in a tendency affecting virtually all crises, come unglued from the nonpolitical “substances” they were meant to express? Is the crisis of representative democracy not explicable in terms of the growing divide between the representatives and the people they were supposed to represent, the very people who feel left out of the political proceedings? Curiously enough, depoliticization is at its crest when politics achieves autonomy by virtue of growing insulated from other parts of existence that denote what Schmitt calls “pure nonpolitics.” And, although he discerns in the last stages of neutralization echoes of the age of technology and “the spirit of technicity” (CP 93), this diagnosis, consistent with the conservative Weltanschauung of Germany in the 1930s, contravenes the immanence of negation to the political (its self-negation) in Schmitt’s writings. It would have been more theoretically consistent to locate the rationale behind depoliticization in the stringency, inflexibility, and tautological identity of the political categories “decategorized,” so to speak, into a concept or into a system of classifications.

If it is to hold on to its vitality, intrapolitics cannot turn into a closed system with its peculiar logic, rules, vocabulary and discourse, technical and theoretical apparatus, apart from infrapolitics. Categorial contamination is inescapable in politics that abhors the enclosure of ipseity and overflows the conceptually nonpolitical spheres. Impurity (and, with it, a challenge to metaphysics) is part and parcel of politics. A breathable membrane between the intra- and the infra-, politics is a situational and mobile alignment of the categories ever on the cusp of politicization and depoliticization.

ORDINARY LANGUAGE POLITICS

Perhaps because he is not a philosopher, or perhaps due to an implicit Kantian bias, Schmitt is somewhat methodologically careless as he touches upon the nature of conceptuality in contrast to the categories. Near the beginning of The Concept of the Political, he writes: “A conceptual determination of the political can be obtained only by discovering and establishing specifically political categories [Eine Begriffsbestimmung des Politischen kann nur durch Aufdeckung und Feststellung der spezifisch politischen Kategorien gewonnen werden]” (CP 25). Schmitt goes on to introduce “its own criteria [seine eigenen Kriterien]” (read: the friend-enemy distinction) to substantiate the category, by means of which he hopes to achieve the “conceptual determination of the political.”

Bracketing for a moment the difference between the concept and the categories overlooked in the programmatic statement on “conceptual determination,” the argument concerning the impurity of the thing itself, of the political res, plays a devil’s advocate to Schmitt’s demand for “specifically political categories.” In another passage from the same book, he will reclaim that impurity for the sake of his method, noting that “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning” (CP 30). In Political Theology, the German jurist will modify the source of “all” that is political, albeit with continued emphasis on nonpolitical origination: “all pregnant concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological concepts [Alle prägnanten Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre sind säkularisierte theologische Begriffe].”17 The latter thesis is then echoed in Political Theology II: “All detheologized concepts carry the weight of their scientifically impure origins.”18 The ensemble of these ideas amounts to what, in my previous work on Schmitt, I called “the structural displacement of political conceptuality,”19 which I am pursuing here apropos of the tensions between the concept and the categories.

Worth noting in this respect is that the much-cited sentence from Political Theology does not address political concepts in the abstract. Nor does it handle the concept of the political and its heavy theological luggage. Schmitt is clear that he is only scrutinizing the “concepts of the modern doctrine of the state,” Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre, and it is obviously a gross mistake to confound such concepts with politics, which is not, by any stretch of the imagination, equivalent to the state. The majesty and quasi-divinity of the sovereign, who (immanently transcendent, in but not of the administered political world) decides on the exception, are of limited use for the elucidation of political concepts and categories. The age of state actors tends to procure political terms from secularized theological concepts; many notions operative in modern politics, for their part, have been mediated by sacralized mundane categories. Examples abound: constitution, representation, movement, and the state itself are words current in nonpolitical epistemic sectors, such as physics, chemistry, philosophy, jurisprudence, and everyday discourse, among others. Not to mention the right-left alignment (which gained traction in the French Revolution of 1789, when deputies in the National Assembly sat to the two sides of the president’s chair according to their support for the king or the revolution,20 and which is still instrumental for organizing political spatiality) transposed from the individual-corporeal to a collective-partisan orientation.

The admittedly partial organization of political spatiality along the right-left axis hints at the overwhelming origination of its phenomena in everyday experience, very much in consonance with phenomenological insights. It augurs, above and beyond the historical context of enunciating modern politics in revolutionary France, a return to the political thing itself, the res publica that is literally at hand—right or left. Instead of the concept-theology-event complex, res publica is steeped in the matrix of categories-phenomenology-experience, which includes this first complex as a deficient modality. Theological and phenomenological apprehensions are to be sharply contrasted. The former belongs to the politics of the extraordinary (Schmitt, Arendt …) with its extreme possibilities of killing and being killed, exceptional decisions, revolutionary cataclysms and renewals. The latter is appropriate to the politics of the ordinary, of publicness in all its vulgarity and commonality tied to the populus, of the daily (and nightly) political life between institutional inertia and the imperceptible, subtle acts of refounding our coexistence. Seen in light of modality, political theology hankers after pure, often unrealizable possibility, and political phenomenology opts for existence, itself permeated by the possible.

In a move that will probably frustrate widely held expectations, I advance that the focus on the categories mediating the political thing itself is not doomed to dullness when compared to the excitement of the concept and the event. Novelty and vitality are not necessarily conditional on constant change, as the ideology of modernity exacerbated in postmodernity makes us believe. They break out when one stumbles upon the previously unthought dimensions of commonplace phenomena. What categorial thinking allied to a phenomenological outlook holds in store is the Brechtian “alienation effect,” Verfremdungseffekt, defamiliarizing the familiar in politics and elsewhere. What it proposes is that we reacquaint ourselves with the extraordinary potentials of the ordinary extinguished under layers of normalization and rendered inconspicuous right on the superficies of things.

On the political terrain, the categories do not boast the transcendental, a priori overtones Kant saddles them with. Consulting a sample from each of the four major groups of categories in Critique of Pure Reason, we will ascertain their popularization (could we say “their democratization”?) in politics. Under the heading of modality, possibility connotes the hope for or the fear of a future projected to be better or worse than the present. In terms of quantity, plurality encompasses many political subjects (say, voting citizens), each of whom counts as exactly one based on the rule “one person, one vote.” The qualitative subcategory limitation comes through in the legal stipulations regulating membership in a polity and, more directly still, in the physical borders, within which that polity exists. The relational category of community is likewise straightforward: it describes the political group, friends united by a common bond to the territory, to the history they share, or to an idea, and in some cases by affective and existential opposition to those they hold to be their enemies.

Political categories are spoken in the vernacular, no doubt because, in order to make sense, they must appeal to an average citizen, not to a phenomenologist or a political scientist. But there is also another, nonstatistical averageness at stake in the vulgarization of philosophical categories that relinquish their haughtiness the moment they figure in political discourse. I mean the averageness of lived experience itself.

On the hither side of populist stratagems and manipulations of public opinion, the mundane ring of political categories is an indicator of their nearness to the res publica, whose contours they retrace. More to the point, an “authentic” breed of populism is not so different from a rhetorical and practical approximation to res publica; thus, it is nothing to sneer at, nothing to revile in the spirit of elitism. Ernesto Laclau was right to shift the problem of populism from the abstract, decontextual, and conceptually purist query what is it? to the substantive question of the political this: “of what social reality or situation is populism the expression?”21 I, for my part, would highlight not so much the problem of expression as the word reality in this articulation that grazes the political thing itself. According to the Kantian category it is clustered with, reality designates the quality of politics, and so diverts populism from the rhetorical flourishes and persuasion techniques that drain it of substance. I am, consequently, tempted to retranslate Laclau’s inquiry along categorial lines: “What is the quality of a political situation that would require populism? Of which underlying need is it a symptom?” And, as an aside: Why does the publica portion of res publica get twisted into the popular appeal of populism when both adjectives derive from the same Latin word, populus, “people”?

The averageness of the lived experience populism evinces is caught between two political theological extremes. First comes the thesis vox populi, vox Dei, “the voice of the people is the voice of God,” the medieval take on the biblical command addressed to Samuel, , “hear the voice of the people,” which in Latin reads audi vocem populi (1 Samuel 8:7). Then, the thesis is negated, the antithesis appearing in Alcuin of York, notably in a protestation he registers in a letter to Charlemagne: “Do not listen to those who say ‘vox populi, vox Dei,’ since the tumultuousness of the crowd is always close to madness [Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit].”22 Between divine inspiration and insanity—the one frequently indistinguishable from the other—what “the people” has to say and what its leaders are urged to hear or to ignore are exceptions reserved for limit situations, not a solid basis for authority. Populist averageness is suspended between two far-from-average poles. Reactions to populism gravitate toward a glorification or a demonization of the populus, its voice amplified or drowned out, leaving no one neutral. Whatever the response, populism provides a useful index of politicization and signals a yearning for the return of the political. Uttered in vox populi, political categories receive the same impetus as the phenomena that logos allows to be said and seen in phenomenology.

The “ordinary” content of political categories is at antipodes to the metaphysical simplicity of the concept, produced through the reduction of multiple realities to an underlying unity. Despite (or thanks to) their plainness, these categories recapitulate the intricacies of res publica steeped in lived averageness even in the exceptional and perilous circumstances that call for a sovereign decision on the fate of the polity. In this way, not just democracy but any political regime is “complex,” an ontological and methodological position defended in Daniel Innerarity’s democratic political thought.23 The sole difference of note is that democracy is the one regime conscious of its complexity as evident in a plurality of conditions and self-restrictions it must abide by: limitation of terms, types of majority, division of powers, constitutional checks and balances, and so on.

Still, there needs to be enough room in the vernacular categorization of political phenomena for alienation effects. How does the lived averageness of res publica become defamiliarized? Without resorting to the eventful irruption of the exception, ordinary realities may start brimming with extraordinary overtones in light of the inherently incomplete formalization of political categories, public existence oozing through their cracks. Although we are alive to their categorial ancestry, hope and fear never add up to abstract possibility; the borders of a polity are not subsumed under the qualitative category of limitation; and political unity is not grasped as an instance of quantity alone.

The case of borders is enlightening here. The physical delimitation of a state endows the territory it occupies with qualitative political determinations. Yet, with the decline of the nation-state, such limitations have become more and more symbolic, rather than material, as in the creation of Europe’s Schengen Area of twenty-six states that have abolished passport and other controls at their borders. The right-wing plea for a border wall (between the southern United States and Mexico, for example) craves the restoration of concrete divisions between what (or who) is inside and what (or who) is outside a polity, supposedly robbed of its qualitative determinateness by the dematerialization of borders. Undoubtedly, such a demand emanates from nostalgia for the supposed certainties of past categorization, but what it really announces is a failure of political imagination. A line, Kant tells us, must be initially drawn in our minds, produced by the subject in herself, in the a priori “productive synthesis of imagination,” before it is actually put on paper or another material substratum (CPR A118). The nonphysical construction of borders operates at an imaginative, transcendental level; the call to build a wall thirsts for an empirical confirmation, reproducing the synthesis already realized in political subjectivity. By itself, the brute fact that there are multiple and competing approaches to the issue of state borders forecloses their ideal coincidence with the qualitative category of limitation. Within the range of options available to us, however, postnationalist “open” borders produced largely in political imagination come nearer to a philosophical categorial construction than their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

With a view to generalizing these observations, I conclude that political categories are self-deformalizing. True to their place in the interstices between I/we and being, upon which Hegel remarked, they refuse to leave the “thing itself” behind. The defamiliarization they promise is, therefore, also twofold in its fidelity to the interstitial locus of the categories: (1) realities “on the ground” are subject to the alienation effect induced by the thinking that singles them out and, in the accusative, calls them forth from the undifferentiated backdrop of political existence; and (2) the movement of abstraction is aborted halfway and prevented from becoming absolute by the nonconceptual nature of the categorial fold. It is the very relation between theory and practice that hangs in the balance in the self-deformalization of political categories.

A CATEGORIAL POLITICS OF TRUTH

Since the inception of our metaphysical tradition, truth has been at the center stage of politics. From Plato’s Ideas, dictating the only rationally acceptable course of action carried out by the philosopher-king, to modern ideologies, inculcating oppressive political demands into our ratiocination and desire, knowledge and power have been tied in a Gordian knot, well before Michel Foucault’s micropolitics. With the rise of Trump, ideological distortion is all but jettisoned, and what we get in its stead are blatantly unadorned lies. In a postmortem of ideology, it would be too precipitous to demarcate the new front lines between a “progressive” appeal to the facts and a “regressive” personal caprice or fancifulness. Would this demarcation not smuggle ideology through the backdoor by presenting facts as the nonideological givens? In Hegel’s phenomenology, raw empiricism is inferior to a subjective delusion, however insane, to the extent that the former, unlike the latter, disguises its subject position behind the claim to total objectivity. A retort to the lies shamelessly spread in public from the highest echelons of power cannot be the knee-jerk response of “fact checking” rampant today. The opportunity our situation presents is that of reframing the question of truth in politics, with the categories playing a lead role in this endeavor.

Note, in the first place, that the criteria for truth have been conventionally planted outside politics. At best, political stratagems are the means for arriving at an externally posited truth, which remains, as in Plato, unaffected by human machinations. At worst, they are obfuscations, an artfully crafted series of impediments to attaining this coveted goal. In Schmitt’s opinion, “to every great politics belongs the arcanum,”24 that is, secrecy, nontransparency, nonphenomenality, the veiling of truth and the withdrawal of res publica with its unconditional givenness. (Chapter 3 of Political Categories will characterize such a mode of givenness as transtranscendental.) The truth of politics for Schmitt is the hiddenness of political truth as an alternative to the Enlightenment organization of society on the scientific footing of efficiency, verifiability, and openness to scrutiny.

Beneath the contest between the politics of clarification and the politics of mystification in modernity is the rift between the subject and the object, with each of the philosophical tectonic plates vying for the title of a true locus of truth. We are surrounded, mentally blockaded, on the one hand, with the fetishes (the “idols,” in Francis Bacon’s locution) of subjective commitment and fidelity to the political cause valorizing possibility and, on the other, with the fetishes of objective facts presented as the fatalistic harbingers of necessity, to which every rational person must submit without exception. The political matter itself is shattered: the discourse of truth is enthralled with the possible or with the necessary, that is, with the disjointed subcategories of modality that have been until fairly recently congruous with the left- and right-wing political factions, respectively.

It is easy to guess that the main exponent of the subject-based politics of truth is Alain Badiou. “Fidelity to the event” is a surrogate for the correspondence of cogitatum and cogitans, refocusing semantic spotlights from the object to the subject of action and from actual existence to possibility: “For me, an event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible and even unthinkable. An event is not by itself the creation of a reality; it is the creation of a possibility, it opens up a possibility.”25 In the Kantian vein of his declaration, Badiou puts his finger on a decisive element of categorial truth, its insubordination to objective-empirical presence, which it incorporates into itself under the umbrella of existence. The truth of possibility is not actualization, proving its viability at the price of ceasing to be possible. Factual “validation” of possibility is tantamount to its betrayal as possibility. A similar analysis applies to necessity as well. We might admit that the heft of facts vicariously carries the load of necessity, but it is erroneous to treat the two as interchangeable. The truth of necessity, itself as nonempirical as that of possibility, is separate from factual veracity.

The possibility of a Communist revolution espied through the grid of political categories is to be taken as seriously as the actual or factual failures of twentieth-century Communist experiments. The nonfruition of an event in historical actuality does not refute revolutionary possibility, as both categories inhere on the same footing within the political thing itself. Arguments that extrapolate from historical experience to the abstract conditions for actualization or nonactualization jumble distinct levels of analysis and categories: the negation of reality in Kant is not equivalent to impossibility. Self-contradictory as res publica consequently appears, it cannot, in truth, be otherwise than refracted through a many-sided categorial prism.

Where Badiou falls short is in extending his idea of truth beyond subjective-nonempirical presence. His event is not the thing itself; it is not a res publica. More than that, political actuality—the quality of political life in its reality limited by the status quo—does not represent in his eyes a politics worthy of the name. But is cherry-picking the categories a sound method to follow? One cannot wager everything on possibility, ignoring necessity, existence, and the sui generis limitations of the historical situation where these modal elements coalesce. To give an acknowledging nod to political reality is not to be converted into a conservative realist, who has capitulated to the dictatorship of facts. Concerning oneself with the real and the possible, along with other categories, is remaining in the vicinity of all the rough edges and clashing dimensions of res publica, irreducible to the one-dimensionality of conceptual veracity.

Though habitually lumped together with the politics of manipulation, machination, and intrigue, Machiavelli’s advice is germane to categorial truth. He implores the prince “to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing [andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa],” instead of indulging in thought experiments that imagine inexistent republics and principalities.26 According to the letter of the text, Machiavelli-the-realist forswears everything not borne out in reality. But the political thing itself, the res that is political reality, contains a miscellany of concrete possibilities (Schmitt, too, qualifies them as “real”; recall his reale Möglichkeit), including those that point toward radical political change. Verità effettuale, or effectual truth, does not expect the correspondence of our inner representations to an externally posited object. Neither is it responsible for the ex nihilo creation of a polity with nothing but subjective commitment (here, fancy: Machiavelli’s target is clearly Plato’s Republic, but doesn’t fiction and, with it, what we call virtuality produce tangible repercussions in the real?)27 for building blocks. It goes “directly,” drieto, to the indirect. Effects are essentially mediations suspended between the cause/cosa and those who experience its impact. The mediate character of effectuality matches the intermediacy of the categories slotted between the thing and the self-conscious I/we of political subjectivity, be it the Machiavellian prince or Marx’s proletariat that, according to Louis Althusser, takes the prince’s place.

Categorial truth leaps over empirical-transcendental, subject-object, and other dualisms that eliminate intermediacy and bankrupt the milieu of thinking. The category of relation does not derive its sense from the preexisting parties it would later conjoin, and it is not guaranteed by a separate (nonrelational and absolute) stratum above, beneath, or behind the dyad. A synecdoche of the category in general, relationality unfolds according to the primacy of the in-between, omitted from the experiential and cognitive fields when we start with the isolated participants. An analysis of power relations between the rulers and the ruled must commence from the excluded middle, from power that rests neither in the rulers nor in the ruled but in the relation itself, and, particularly, in the recognition of its legitimacy, as Hegel and Marx have maintained. Stabilized in identifiable shapes, the truth of this category will reside in its modulations into causality and dependence, inherence and subsistence, and community and reciprocity—or, in terms of politico-economic modes of production, feudalism, capitalism, and communism, respectively. (Could we not envision these Marxist stages in human history as a journey through the different zones of Kantian “relation”?)

The hermeneutic circle of political categories closes shut. Res publica is the truth effect of a categorial conjuncture, and the categories themselves are the folds of the thing’s givenness to us. Beyond the “factual lies” congesting the public sphere, the truth of politics is in how the thing itself stands out in its quantitative and qualitative, temporal and spatial, modal and relational dimensions, which we parse out into categories. The political thing coming to appearance in a categorial constellation can be a state, a type of regime, a supranational (say, cosmopolitan) community, an ideology, a movement, a constitution, a polarized association/dissociation of friends and enemies … The main differences among its various instantiations are attributable to changes in categories: movements are active and instituting, compared to states that are passive and instituted; nation-states do not have the same relation to actual existence and to possibility as cosmopolitanism; the when and where of revolutionary groups have spatiotemporal rhythms of emergence and decay that divagate from a persistent, if evolving or declining, regime.

None of res publica’s facets is more or less political than the others, not because they all have the same underlying substance—the category that would presumably succeed in conceptualizing itself—but because each shares in the effectual truth of politics, scattering the political cause (or Cause). Add to this extravagant copiousness the permeable boundaries between infra- and intrapolitical realities, and see effectual truth grow in potency. But remember: its increasing influence is unlike that of a vortex that, with irresistible centripetal force, pulls everything and everyone in. The porosity of the membrane separating the formally political and nonpolitical realities stimulates a vertiginous back-and-forth between politicization and a reflux from the actually politicized to apolitical existence. The power of effectual truth is in direct proportion to the breathability of this membrane, undoing the identity of the thing that res publica (a heavy emphasis on res to the detriment of publica) has become and letting us relish in its mushrooming effects.